


Misshapen Heart

by Lissadiane



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Past Sexual Assault, Sexual Harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 13:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8403802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane
Summary: It’s a rough neighbourhood and a rougher street, all crumbling brick buildings and burnt out street lights. Even in the alternating lights, I can see the girl’s heart, pounding like a frightened rabbit, mismatched and badly pieced together, like it’s been broken a time or two but never properly set. The fractures scabbed over and healed up but the scar tissue’s unclean. There are more recent wounds too – a contusion. Blunt force trauma. It’s still bleeding.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Listen. I couldn't sleep last night and this strange story started writing itself in my head and I couldn't sleep until I wrote it down, so I did. It's a strange story, and it can be read many ways, but the way it read itself to me as I wrote it is a story about a dark and shadowy place in a city where broken girls go after they have been the victims of sexual assault. The ways they cope manifest themselves in strange and dark ways. 
> 
> There are no instances of sexual assault written out in this story, and it's implied that it happened but not discussed graphically, and you may not read it that way at all, I don't know. I don't want to hurt anybody who may be triggered by that. There are instances of sexual harassment in this story.

The girl stepping through the pools of street lights is wearing, I swear to god, actual Mary Jane shoes, the shining kind that I haven’t seen since I was a kid dressed up for a community hall Christmas party. She’s got neatly folded socks, a plaid skirt down to her knees, a white shirt buttoned all the way up to her throat, and cat-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down her nose. 

She’s pretty much the walking definition of a school girl fantasy. She’s cute, it makes something burn in the back of my throat that feels a little like disgust. I feel like I recognize her, or like I should know her, but I don’t remember much before I came here.

It’s a rough neighbourhood and a rougher street, all crumbling brick buildings and burnt out street lights. Even in the alternating lights, I can see the girl’s heart, pounding like a frightened rabbit, mismatched and badly pieced together, like it’s been broken a time or two but never properly set. The fractures scabbed over and healed up but the scar tissue’s unclean. There are more recent wounds too – a contusion. Blunt force trauma. It’s still bleeding.

It’s… fascinating. I’ve seen a heart like that a time or two. My own used to be misshapen like that, when I was younger.

But that’s not why I interfere.

I interfere because I’m not a monster, for all that my own heart has grown shadowy of late. I intervene because the girl looks all of 16, and lost, and helpless, and for all that I fancy myself a hunter, I never play with my food.

The three men who’ve set their sights on this girl, though, have a reputation.

So I toss my cigarette aside and stomp it with one pointed boot and step away from the wall I’ve been leaning on and fall into step beside her. I sling a casual arm around her shoulders and say, “Hey there, sugar. Come here often?”

She tenses all over an turns to look at me, and for a moment, there’s something that flares in her eyes, something dark and chilling and I wonder if I’ve read her right at all. What if all this – the shoes and the skirt and the dishwater blonde ponytail, what if it’s bait?

“No,” she says politely, after a pause. She stops walking and so do I.

“Let me walk you home,” I say, pleasant.

She studies my face for a moment and then says, “It’s a long walk. You probably wouldn’t make it in heels that high.”

I grin at her, lean closer, like we’re whispering, confidants and co-conspirators, and I say, “The three men behind you, sugar. They’re following you.”

She hums faintly. “Are they?” She doesn’t sound concerned.

She looks back at the three men, all young, scruffy, slumming it from the college up in midtown. They see her looking and one of them calls out, calls her baby, asks if she’s up for a good time, why she’s not smiling. A face that pretty should be smiling.

She turns back to me, just as solemn. “Do you know them?”

“No,” I say. I shrug. “But I know guys like that. We all do, around here. That’s why we look out for each other. I can walk you wherever you want to go, keep you safe.”

She finally smiles, just one corner of her lips twisting upwards. “That’s sweet,” she tells me. “But I’m not afraid.” 

The guys have started in on us both, asking if we are down to fuck, if we are up for a threesome, if we are sideways, over, or under for any sort of variation on the theme. When we don’t answer, they call us bitches, cunts and whores.

“Are you the heart reader?” she asks me, and my heart almost stops.

“How did you –”

They’ve lost their patience now, and they tell us that they don’t need to ask our permission, that they could have us any way they want to, that we’re lucky they wasted their time with us, that we are too ugly, too fat, too thin, to everything to attract their attention.

She takes a deep breath and lets it out and says demurely, “Excuse me.”

I watch, heart still skipping wildly in my chest, as she turns to the boys and seems to grow three sizes, all in the shoulders, the chest. She is surrounded by restless shadow. Her face goes dead pale and her eyes nearly glow, eerie and blue and haunting. Her hair whips around her face, pulling free from her ponytail, even though I don’t feel any wind – the air is humid and still.

She shrieks, a wordless, wounded, furious sound that has the boys running. One of them pisses his pants as he goes.

I wonder if they intend to run all the way back to their school in midtown. I’m willing to bet they won’t come back, won’t hunt for wounded girls down here in the dark and broken side of town again.

The screaming stops abruptly and, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the girl staggers and shrinks back into herself, or a pale imitation of it. She’s trembling, eyes wide and dark like bruises.

I catch her before she falls.

“Sorry,” she stammers. “It takes a lot out of me.”

“What was that?” I ask her, as I hold her up and help her stumble into the sheltered alcove of a doorway that once led to a church. No one has any faith here anymore and the preachers left long ago.

She sits on the stairs and I sit beside her, worried even as colour slowly starts to come back to her face. “I don’t know,” she confesses, eyes distant and unfocused. “I couldn’t never do it, Before.” Her eyes focus suddenly, searching my face intently. “But we all have something, don’t we?”

“I suppose we do,” I say. She hulks out; I read hearts. Maybe she does belong down here with the broken ones.

“I was looking for you,” she says. “They said you read hearts; I was wondering if you could read mine.”

I look away, reluctant. Reading hearts is too much like a secret, and I don’t like to share. But she shared with me, and now she’s sitting there, trembling and pale and broken. Maybe I owe her a secret or two. I don’t like to stay in debt.

“It’s broken,” I say, blunt. “A contusion, broken along pre-existing fault lines.”

“It feels like it’s not beating the same,” she confesses.

“That happens,” I tell her. “You get used to it.” There’s a pause, and reluctantly, I ask, “Was it a stranger or a friend?”

She looks horrified. “A friend would never –”

I look away. “Mine did.”

She’s quiet. What is there to say? There are far too many of us broken girls with broken, bleeding hearts around here, all with our fucked up ways of coping. Finally, she says, quiet, “I think I knew you, Before. It’s hard to remember, but I recognize the lines of your face.”

Her fingers brush feather light against the slope of my jaw and the bridge of my nose. I don’t turn to look at her, I don’t speak, I don’t acknowledge that she could possibly know me at all, because –

“You’re Valerie. Aren’t you?”

My heart stops. 

It’s too many secrets, so I say quickly, “Does it only happen when you’re angry? What happens when you’re scared?”

She smiles faintly. “Fight or flight. Fight when I’m angry, run when I’m scared. We were friends; do you remember?”

I look at her. She looks young like this, her hair falling limply around her pale face, her wide eyes, her school uniform and her trembling fingers. Too young.

And I remember with a start that I’m that young too. I just don’t feel it anymore.

But I can remember some things, some things from Before that I couldn’t remember until she gave me my name back. There are hazy memories of childhood, of sunlight and summer days and the scent of new school supplies and the scratch of pencils in notebooks as I learnt to spell my name. I can remember birthday cake and birthday candles and sleepovers filled with Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle.

And I can remember her – blue eyes and blonde hair and quirky, crooked grin, laughing at dirty jokes and whispering secrets and being so fucking precious that I wanted to die.

My heart is pounding again and it’s creaking, cracking, along all the fault lines where it had broken half a dozen times before I turned fifteen, as I fell in love again and again with my best friend and didn’t even recognize it.

“What does it feel like?” she whispers now, her shaking hands reaching out to wrap around mine, holding them still. “Reading my heart?”

She pulls my hand to her chest, so I can feel her heart, rabbit fast. I can see it between my fingers, misshapen with the same badly healed fractures, as if maybe, maybe, she’d been falling in love and breaking her heart again and again without setting it to heal properly. Like me.

“Like mine is breaking,” I tell her. It’s a secret, but maybe she deserves all the secrets I’ve got.

“We’ve all got something,” she tells me, with the ghost of that crooked, quirky grin.


End file.
